Colorado-based New Belgium Brewing Company has agreed to purchase the assets of San Francisco’s Magnolia Brewing.Magnolia founder Dave McLean filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2015.[...] his two San Francisco breweries have remained open, but the future of the 20-year-old company remained unclear.Citing the recent sale of San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing to Japanese brewery Sapporo, Jordan said: “I just think it’s a really sweet opportunity for Dave, for us, and for the craft brewing community to do something like this.”Perhaps best known for its Fat Tire ale, the company has breweries in Colorado and Asheville, N.C., though Jordan — who lives part-time in San Francisco — said she’d long considered a permanent move to California.Belgian brewery Oud Beersel, known for its lambic beers, has also been named a partner in this deal.

If you're a craft beer connoisseur — or even just an occasional drinker — you've likely noticed that names for new brews are getting out of hand. Likely in order to distance themselves from traditional, European beer names such as Franziskaner Royal, the new breed of craft beer makers are going with increasingly odd names such as Stone Ruination IPA.

My all-time favorite, and I did not make this up, is a beer called "Evil Twin Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight."

So what happens when you employ a neural network to create new craft beer names? Well, pretty much the same thing.

Anchor Brewing, San Francisco’s beloved 121-year-old brewery and creator of the city’s most famous beer, is being sold to Japan’s Sapporo Holdings Ltd. in a landmark deal. According to Keith Greggor, Anchor’s president and CEO, the move was a year in the making and the result of speaking with “many, many” larger breweries all over the world to find the right fit. Anchor Brewing Co. is considered the leading pioneer of the craft beer movement, and is credited with reviving and modernizing some of today's most popular American beer styles. Anchor Distilling, which produces spirits such as Junipero Gin and Old Potrero whiskey, is not involved in the deal and will become a separate company. The news comes as the latest in a line of high-profile craft breweries purchased by larger beverage companies, following in the footsteps of Heineken’s acquisition of Lagunitas, Constellation’s 2015 takeover of Ballast Point, and AB InBev’s purchases of Goose Island and Wicked Weed, among many others. Yet Anchor representatives said its beer would continue to be brewed at its Potrero Hill headquarters, and there would be no changes to its beer recipes. Of all the people we spoke to, (Sapporo) respected Anchor the most, what it stood for and the importance of its connection with San Francisco. [...] by 1965, Anchor was in dire shape and on the verge of bankruptcy when Fritz Maytag, working off a tip from an Old Spaghetti Factory bartender, bought the capsizing company for a few thousand bucks. In subsequent years, he added four beers to Anchor’s repertoire that no one else in America was making: the dry-hopped Liberty Ale, a dark porter (Anchor Porter), a barley wine (Old Foghorn Barleywine Ale) and, in a tradition that continues today, the first Anchor Christmas Ale. Yet Anchor’s new move signals a direction that is not so much trailblazing as it is increasingly conventional. In a statement, Masaki Oga, Sapporo Holdings’ president and representative director, likened the lengthy histories of the two breweries, noting that Anchor has inspired a “new generation of brewers and beer lovers around the world.” [...] the deal also likely means that Anchor’s long-delayed Pier 48 expansion is more likely to be dead in the water, though Anchor would not comment on the status of the project. When asked whether this deal jeopardizes Anchor’s “craft” designation, a commonly accepted definition dictated by the Brewers Association, the brewery’s executives did not seem concerned about that imminent debate, due to the brewery’s long history.

Fieldwork Brewing Co.: A juggernaut built on fresh beer If Fieldwork Brewing Co.’s founders went with their first idea, the brewery might have debuted as a sours-only beer producer in Paso Robles (San Luis Obispo County). Fortunately for Bay Area beer drinkers, the two co-owners — businessman Barry Braden and brewer Alex Tweet — scrapped the original plan to try something different. The first Fieldwork taproom opened in West Berkeley in early 2015; Braden and Tweet quickly added taprooms in Napa and Sacramento, and earlier this month opened a massive beer garden in San Mateo. “It’s unique to have this many satellite locations open in this amount of time,” says Bart Watson, Chief Economist for the Brewers Association. A huge portion of their business model is service-based. For Braden, the decision to set up shop in Northern California was rooted in coming home to his family in the East Bay; for Tweet, a brewer who trained at Ballast Point in San Diego and helped launch Southern California craft juggernaut Modern Times, it was about getting out of that increasingly congested beer scene. “If you took our ingredients, our recipes, our process, our labor and put it into most other breweries, the only term you would hear is that it’s not ‘commercially viable,’” says Tweet. Noting that he doesn’t think Fieldwork’s rate of growth is “normal,” Braden says the company’s unique model — quickly setting up taprooms and beer gardens, and also having those be the only place to buy packaged 16-ounce cans of fresh beer — is what makes it profitable, even though their beer can cost upwards of $125 a barrel to produce. According to the Brewers Association, that figure is on the high end of the standard production cost range. Let the consumers come fill up their growlers and drink beer that was kegged two days ago, which you can’t do if you buy beer in the stores. Up to 15 taps pour new, one-off and seasonally recurring brews, with no stringent limit to the compendium of styles offered. Recent releases, for example, include classic farmhouses, IPAs and pilsners, but also avant-garde experiments like Father of the Wolf, a peaty Russian imperial stout aged in Scotch barrels with Celtic sea salt and — seriously — leather. Financially, it means a constant flow of beer fans returning multiple times per week to find out what’s new.